[Linganth] Language & Culture Course / Covid syllabi and Race

Wed Jun 17 23:13:47 UTC 2020

Dear Shannon and colleagues,

I wrote my online Spring 2020 class of Language in Culture as one dedicated
to Covid-19. I only had a few days to design it before the UCLA quarter
started, so pardon any omissions. The idea was to frame the class as a
therapeutic process to shift into analyst mode and chronicle the changes as
they were/are happening. Students kept fieldnotes throughout their quarter
and online (and some in-person) ethnographic projects, and my hope was that
it would be helpful in their own healing to journal throughout the quarter.
My syllabus is attached. Overall it was an incredibly fruitful class. And
the online modality opened up so many opportunities for teacher-student
engagement.

*About the class:*

I spent one week teaching a handful of chapters from Lisa Capps and Elinor
Ochs' *Constructing Panic*, as the home was being reimagined and
experienced for all of us at the onset of stay-at-home orders. Students
really liked that text. Moral panics and the role of the media in creating
such swirls was a focus as well, which I then used to transition into moral
panics about race and language. That was in the middle of the quarter and
acted as my segue into more explicit conversations about race.

I had designed a final where students could do an in-person or online
ethnographic project that was somehow related to Covid-19. In the end, I
decided to make it optional. However, many students did submit or met with
me to share their findings on topics such as online dating during Covid,
Zoom classes, Trump’s press briefings, an analysis of late-night talk show
monologues and switched comedy formats during this time, conversations with
family members who are essential workers, conspiracy theory, debates about
Black lives on The Shade Room, and more. I had integrated online
ethnographies into the entire class since those works would mirror their
own research process best. And then finally I sent the class resources on
how to publish their work beyond the academy whether in op-ed form or in
platforms such as this one <https://anthrocovid.com/1-2/> that’s collecting
anthropologists’ accounts of what’s going on.

*About race issues*:

I understand where the request for resources about the “race issues we are
experiencing” is coming from, but the wording of that request hints at a
sense that race issues we experience are new in the US and abroad, which is
a problematic basis from which to teach the topic at this time, or anytime.
I’m confident you do not mean it this way, but I think this is a good
opportunity to bring up in this community the topic of racism and teaching
about race and racism in linguistic anthropology.

As I’ve followed recent online discussions on race, I have noticed that
they tend to center on two issues: 1) The potential of our analytical tools
for activism and structural change and 2) Diversity within academia. There
is overlap between these points, but they are different.  #1 does not
address the problems regarding #2. Both need to be addressed in my opinion
when teaching about racism in linguistic anthropology courses.

1) We know that the tools in linguistic anthropology can be used to
understand and analyze what is going on, and that there are numerous
readings and research that attend to race and racism, like the ones Rachel
and others have generously shared already. In my syllabi, I also make sure
to talk about the creation of whiteness and racial socialization of that
racial identity, indeed many students think “race issues” are about Black
people and do not have to do with White people as racialized subjects,
though perhaps there is an opening for change there now… In any case, I
make a nod to Toni Morrison’s recorded interview
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S7zGgL6Suw> about racism as White
people’s problem to fix in class. I supplement that video with readings
from *White Kids* (2011) by Mary Bucholtz. Students have also really
enjoyed reading articles and excerpts by sociologist Margaret Hagerman.
This spring I taught one chapter ‘Shaking Those Ghetto Booties*’*: Family
Race Talk from her 2018 book *Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially
Divided America*, and students were shocked to read about liberal upper
class family conversations on race. These works encapsulate how close
attention to language and the tools of linguistic anthropology can be
mobilized to dissect racism and I place them and others on my syllabus
whenever possible. But of course, reading and teaching is one thing and
structural change in the discipline’s hiring practices is another, which is
what leads me to #2:

2) This second issue is one where I have felt the great hypocrisy of my
subfield. There’s now again heightened awareness among the white majority
of racism and black representation in institutions. So now is a good time
to ask:  Where are the black linguistic anthropologists in tenured
positions? Where are the black female linguistic anthropologists on
syllabi? Why are there more black scholars in sociolinguistics as opposed
to in linguistic anthropology? What is going on in our subfield? Let’s talk
about representation on syllabi, in the subfield, and why our field is
great at dissecting racism but clearly not in creating inclusive
anti-racist spaces where Black people want to be or are welcomed to thrive.

I am Japanese-American and Afrolatina. In this country I am often read as
an ethnically ambiguous Latina and/or Asian-American unless my hair is
braided or is natural, and in such cases my treatment is markedly
different, and I have found it takes more energy to move in academia as a
Black woman than as an Asian or an ambiguously non-white one. When read and
treated as Black I am petted in hallways and gatherings with some
colleagues, stared down, told that my placement in my graduate program was
because of affirmative action, and generally I feel so much more
vulnerable. Of course I can say more, but my point is that there is
something askew with how Blackness and Black people (esp. women) are
treated in academia, in anthropology, and in linguistic anthropology. My
vantage point as a “transracial subject” (Alim 2016) has allowed me to see
and experience this very specific issue with Blackness in our discipline.

The problem therefore of race issues and racism cannot be only about the
points in #1 and remedying it by making sure we have a token Black person
citation on a syllabus or present at a conference. I of course do not think
that was the spirit of Shannon’s inquiry at all, but I’m using this as an
opportunity to voice my concern that the syllabi that come for summer and
onwards do not simply make a nod to the “race issues we are currently
facing.” These are long-standing issues and my stance is that the catch-22
of it all must be addressed. Readings by the very few black linguistic
anthropologists need to be assigned consciously since without that effort
it is not consistently done across the field, and at the same time “race
and racism” cannot be relegated to one day in class, it must be integrated
throughout the course. I affirm that students need to *see *and *read *that
there are black linguistic anthropologists, especially with mention of the
history and presence (and lack thereof) of Black people in this field.

Why is there such a dearth of Black people in our subfield community? I
started a list below, and I would absolutely love to see that list grow,
I’m hopeful that there are more faculty than I am aware of and I trust
there are more newly minted Phds like myself on this list. (And of course
we must also be aware that the graduation rates for BIPOC in grad school is
a very related issue as well. Racial and class diversity in the beginning
cohort of a grad program is one thing, conferred Phds is another.)

Below is the list of Black linguistic anthropology tenured or tenure-track
professors I know of and whose work I cite in my syllabi and/or lectures,
please add more, I would like to learn their names and read their work:

Lanita Jacobs
<https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1003379>,
Associate
Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at USC. She
received her PhD in Linguistic anthropology at UCLA about twenty years ago.

Marcyliena Morgan <https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/marcyliena-morgan>,
Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Professor of African and
African American Studies, and Executive Director of the HipHop Archive and
Research Institute at Harvard University.

Claudia Mitchell-Kernan
<https://aas.princeton.edu/people/claudia-mitchell-kernan>, Professor
Emerita of Anthropology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at
Princeton. Her early work formed the basis of linganth centering focus on
Black women's speech.

Krystal Small <https://linguistics.illinois.edu/directory/profile/ksmalls>s,
Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Samy Alim <https://www.anthro.ucla.edu/faculty/h-samy-alim>, Professor and
David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Division of Social
Sciences at UCLA.

Django Paris <https://education.uw.edu/people/dparis>, Associate Professor
and James A. & Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education at the
University of Washington.

Jim Baugh <https://sites.wustl.edu/baugh/>, Professor of Psychology,
Anthropology, Education, English, Linguistics, and African and
African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

All the best,

Teru

Alim, H. Samy. 2016. “Who's Afraid of the Transracial Subject?
Raciolinguistics an the Political Project of Transracialization.” In
*Raciolinguistics:
How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race, *First edition, edited by H. Samy
Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, 33–50. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Teruko Vida Mitsuhara, Ph.D.

Lecturer, UCLA Anthropology

https://terukomitsuhara.com

Preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
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